Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

To follow on with the same theme, there is an extraordinary disconnect between the rhetoric and the aspirations that often surround discussions about the EU by the supporters of the EU, such as the Minister of State, the Government and the main Opposition party, and the reality of what is going on in Europe. It is not an exaggeration to say it is Orwellian. That term is often thrown around, but I recommend the Minister of State to go back and read 1984, because what we are seeing is starting to look alarmingly like that. We hear talk about peace and that Europe is promoting peace, but what we get are battle groups, and the very intense push to develop and expand the European arms industry selling weapons of mass destruction. It is trying to involve Ireland in the arms industry in producing components and so on.

Some of us pointed out the enormous irony at the time of the peace agreement in the North. The big talk was of taking the gun out of Irish politics. Within weeks of those statements, an arms plant was established in Derry to produce components for patriot missiles. We take the gun out of the North and are putting missiles into countries throughout the world. That is the contradiction.

Deputy Wallace is right about Ukraine - there are no good guys. There are many ordinary people who were rightly angry about corruption and joined those demonstrations. However, some of the leading forces in those were vicious, pro-Nazi and scary people. The opposition and government there are rotten and they are being stirred up by cynical manipulation by both Russia and, sadly, by the European Union as well. The EU's assistance to states is always conditional on those states essentially moving into its camp.

We saw this previously with the Balkans. It is well worth remembering what happened in the Balkans - of course it also happened at the beginning of the 20th century and led to the First World War. The manipulation by the big powers and big empires led to the crisis in the Balkans that produced the First World War.

We saw it again at the end of the 1990s when there was an economic collapse in the former Yugoslavia and legitimate anger against the rotten old communist regime and so, on but that anger was channelled in a nationalist direction by people who sidled up to forces in Europe. Those forces in Europe actively encouraged them. The unilateral decision by Germany to recognise the independence of Slovenia and Croatia was the direct spark that led to the Balkans crisis. Then the literal partitioning on a map, in line with the various accords, of what used to be a multi-ethnic society along ethnic lines led directly, whether intentional or not, to the brutal civil war and all the horrors that followed. Then there were the NATO bombings afterwards and all the rest of it. That is the reality.

Similarly, we hear talk of social and economic justice but what we actually get is a European Central Bank and European institutions that insist that, at all costs, we bail out banks, corporate entities and so on which are driven by nothing but greed and which have driven the European economy, including this country, to the edge of the abyss and demanded that ordinary citizens pay the bill with vicious and brutal austerity and mass unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, across Europe.

I want to mention the transatlantic trade and investment partnership talks that are taking place, on which I hope journalists and the wider public will focus. No doubt the Minister of State would probably trumpet those talks as a wonderful development in terms of big trade deals between the EU and US. In reality, at the centre of these is that new courts of arbitration will be set up between states and corporations to give investors even more protection than they already have and to circumvent the environmental, social and labour laws of individual states such that governments would be precluded from enacting laws that protect the environment, workers' rights, social equality or in any way infringe on the right of big corporations to make profits. It is more of the same. It is Orwellian and we should reject moving in that direction.

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